Google Trys Out Display Ads In Gmail

Not content with posting fourth quarter :earnings of almost $8.5 billion last week, Google has now confirmed that it will be trying to squeeze a few more advertising dollars out of us by putting display ads next to our emails.

Reports began circulating last week that users of Google's very popular email client, Gmail began seeing display ads on the right-hand pane of their email service. Heretofore this column had been reserved for text-only ads but now Google has confirmed that it is trialing display ads similar to the one seen below.
Text links are of course a lot easier to ignore despite the links containing ads for words or terms found within the body of our emails. While we have yet to see display ads in our emails, we imagine it will be a bit more distracting email experience. Asked by the guys over at Search Engine Land about the new initiative, Google had the following statement to make: "We're always trying out new ad formats and placements in Gmail, and we recently started experimenting with image ads on messages with heavy image content."

While this appears to be a limited trial at the moment, we do hope it doesn’t work out as we don’t want these picture adverts to spoil what is otherwise a pretty good email experience.